Code
import plotly.io as pio
# Load the saved Plotly figure from JSON
fig = pio.read_json("council_stock_london.json")
# Display it inline, fully responsive
fig.show()Fig. 1: The number of council homes by borough.
You might have seen the headlines in the past few weeks, about the crisis in council finances linked to the rising costs of providing temporary accommodation. In the UK local authorities have a prevention duty, a statutory obligation to mitigate people becoming homeless. Historically, the typical state intervention would be to find suitable council housing in the local area. However, increasingly local authorities don’t have enough council housing available, and are instead placing people in accommodation the council leases from the private sector. This accommodation can range from private rental flats, to hotels or hostels. In 2024, over 80,000 people were assessed as being owed a prevention duty, leading to some areas spending over 20% of their total council budget on securing temporary accommodation; aggravating the finances of councils already on the brink of bankruptcy.
Aside from the financial cost, the type of accommodation provided as temporary accommodation has been heavily criticised. Firstly it is often not temporary, with people stuck in this accommodation limbo for years. Secondly the accommodation is often not suitable for habitation, with notable examples lacking space, cooking facilities, or even windows making the news. This is perhaps particularly disturbing considering that in 2024, 25% of households owed a relief duty were families with children.
The most obvious solution to the temporary accommodation crisis, would be if there was suitable council housing available. More council housing would allow for temporary accommodation to just be a stop gap (as originally intended) before permanent accommodation is found. The housing crisis in the UK is a complex problem, and the rise in people requiring temporary accommodation is both a symptom of how broken the housing system is, and also a factor in escalating the crisis. In response to the current housing crisis, the UK government has set ambitious housebuilding targets for their term in office, this includes 81,000 residential units being built per year in London. Far smarter people than me have written again and again about how the construction of new council housing (and crucially the ending of right to buy) is needed to fix the crisis. This got me wondering, in the midst of this crisis in temporary accommodation, what, if anything, councils have been doing to address the lack of council housing. Here I’m going to look specifically at the situation in London — I’m biased towards London as it is the city I live and work in, but also because there’s heaps of open data for it.
What happened to all the state owned housing?
First lets try to ubnderstand the exisitng stock of council housing in London. The peak of council housing construction in the UK was in the early 1950s, when there was a significant push to improve living standards in the wake of the second world war. The rate of council housing construction has been in decline ever since. Following the introduction of right to buy by the Thatcher government in 1980, there has been a further large scale sell off of council housing into private ownership. The lack of construction plus sell-off has resulted in a precipitious decline in council stock since the 80s, as you can see below in Fig. 1.
In addition there have also been a few notable cases of ‘failed’ council housing estates being demolished to make way for redevelopment. Perhaps the most famous example of this in London is Robin Hood Gardens, which was simultaneously celebrated for it’s pioneering brutalist design, and criticised for creating unfavourable living conditions1. In the case of redevelopment the local council will often set requirements that the new development replaces the council housing units lost in demolition - however often the work is undertaken by private construction firms, who reduce the number of social hosuing units. Of the remaining stock of council housing, there have been issues about the livable condition of them. Damp, mould, leakages: all seemingly due to councils struggling to renovate, or retrofit these properties.
Analysing the planning applications
Now we cna start looking at what has been proposed for development in London. The main source of data for this is the Planning London Datahub - it is an open dataset of all planning applications filed in London - developed and maintained by the Greater London Authority (GLA). It consists of tabular, free-text and geospatial data from all 33 local authority districts in London (the 32 boroughs plus the City of London). The dataset has some records going back to the mid 20th century, however here I’m just going to look at whats happened in the last ten years, from 1/1/2015 onwards.
In the period 1/1/2015 to 1/1/2025, 1,117 planning applications which included at least one council housing unit (units just means one habitable space such as a flat or house, it could be of any size, or number of rooms) were filed in London.
Fig. 2 shows the breakdown of the 30,428 council units proposed - of which 77% were proposed as part of mixed developments. Thinking of traditional housing blocks or estates in the UK, most council units constructed in the 20th century were part of developments where all of the homes were constructed as council housing. Increasingly council housing units are being constructed as part of larger developments with units of mixed status. This is partly due to councils trying to reclaim some of the developers windfall in land price accumualion from permitted developemnt by placing constarints on a certain number of council units being constrcuted.
Code
import plotly.io as pio
# Load the saved Plotly figure from JSON
fig = pio.read_json("units_by_year.json")
# Display it inline, fully responsive
fig.show()Fig 2: The number of planning applications filed by year which include at least one social housing unit gain. The colour coding represents the number of applications which are for developments where 100% of the units will be council housing (green), versus those where council housing units are proposed alongside other types of residential units (blue).
Alongside council and private units these developments might include other ‘affordable’2 housing. ‘Affordable’ housing is a catch all term used by the GLA which covers all housing which costs less for the inhabitant compared to comparable properties on the private market - in addition to council housing this includes: discount market rent, discount market sale, and shared ownership. I’m not considering these other types of ‘affordable’ housing because they are accessed via the private housing market, and as such fulfill a different purpose, and cater to a different group of people, within the housing ecosystem than council housing.
Fig. 3 shows the planning applications located on a map. The scatter points are scaled according to the the number of total units in the development (including both council housing, and not council housing). If you hover over any of the scatter points you can find out more details for each planning application.
Code
import plotly.io as pio
# Load the saved Plotly figure from JSON
fig = pio.read_json("council_proposed_london_cumulative_map.json")
fig.update_layout(height=700)
# Display it inline, fully responsive
fig.show()Fig. 3: A map of all planning applications filed since 1/1/2015 where at least one council housing residential unit is proposed. The scatter points are scaled by the size of the development, and colour-coded according to the the type of development.
You might notice the map is dominated by large blue circles, with a scattering of smaller green circles. The mixed developments have an average of 224 proposed residential units, of which 47 were designated as council housing. Whereas the entirely council housing developments have an average number of 11 units proposed.
Where are they finding the space?
Something which often comes up in discussion about the housing crisis in London is the lack of available land for development3. The GLA defines small sites, as plots of land measuring less than 0.25 hectares or 2500 m^2 (thats approximately the size of one third of a football pitch). Fig. 4 recreates the map in Fig. 3, but this time the planning applicatiosn are colour coded according to he area of the site being proposed for development.
Code
import plotly.io as pio
# Load the saved Plotly figure from JSON
fig = pio.read_json("council_proposed_london_cumulative_map_site_area.json")
fig.update_layout(height=700)
# Display it inline, fully responsive
fig.show()Fig. 4: A map of all planning applications filed since 1/1/2015 where at least one council housing residential unit is proposed. The scatter points are scaled by the size of the development (as above), and colour-coded according to the size of the site being proposed for development.
Looking at the planning applications, 61% are for small sites. Of the mixed developments, the average site area was 9,294m^2, whilst the average site area for the entirely social housing developments was 1,621m^2. Look at the applications these seem to be on land that is either brownfield, or which has exisiting unused infrastructure such as garages, end of terraces, or carparks. Of the mixed development sites 98 were located in opportunity areas - brownfield land earmarked for development by the London Plan 2021. Of the entirely social housing developments, 60 were located in opportunity areas.
A case of quality over quantity?
A picture is starting to build of small scale building, of small number of residential units on small sites. We can see what some councils have built in this time.
Haringey has a really nice interactive map of their recent council housing developments. And so does Greenwich.
Looking at soem of these examples, they seem high quality, with heatpumps, solar panels, and accessible designs.
The icing on the cake, is that some are notably aestheticaly pleasing, going beyond the ‘New London vernacular’ which dominates the private market, and has been slated as ‘beige’4. A few recent award winning council housing projects in London include:
Chowdury Walk in Hackney which won the RIBA National Award 2024, and the Neave Brown Award 2024. Eleven two storey houses, on a plot which was previously garages and parking.
Tessa Jowel Court in Haringey, which was nominated for the 2023 Stirling Prize. Six council homes, and adjacent community play centre.
Harvey Gardens in Greenwich which won the New London Awards 2022. Four homes and six apartments for people over 60 years.
But don’t we need quantity?
The state recognises a responsibility to provide accommodation for it’s citizens, but that accomodation needs to not just be stable and affordable, but also of a quality that improves both our physical and mental health.
London, and the UK in general, desperately needs housing to fix the crisis. Have some old stock which is in a bad state, plus have some new builds coming to market which are extremely high quality. It’s great that they are high quality, nice to live in and sustainable for both the people and planet. But, have gaping hole of housing problems, and it’s like they’re trying to plug it with tiny marbles.
So, question is, are councils forced to build this type of housing because they don’t have the money to build more? Don’t have the resources to build more? It’s better value than retrofitting old stock of housing (they don’t have enough in house ways to do this – all through expensive contractors, so ends up being taken on by housing authority or developers, but then rising costs (or just capitalism) lead to the spaces becoming privatised)? Don’t have the physical space to build more (probably not, as some councils do have space, i.e. large brownfield sites, and they still aren’t building more)?
The London Plan 2021 developed by the Greater London Authority (GLA) set a slightly more modest goal of 66,000 residential units per year in the capital, of which 50% should be ‘’affordable’’’, a category which includes traditional council housing.
The code for the graphs can be found here: https://github.com/Bea-Taylor/london_council_housing. All the data used here is open source, and can be found linked in the notebooks.
Footnotes
At the other end of the scale in London, some former council blocks are now almost entirely sold off into private owenrships, becoming icons of 20th century Brutalism, commodifying the aesthetic of post war state-led urban developments. There’s an interesting critique of this ‘beautiful Brutalism’ trend here.↩︎
I use quotation marks here not just because I’m a cynic, but also since these ‘affordable’ prices are calculated with regard to the private housing sector which is an inaccessible bubble, and they are not calculated in terms of prices local people can actually afforded based on their salaries.↩︎
Which has led to the GLA annoucing changing development rights regarding Londons green belt.↩︎
Their words not mine.↩︎